April’s Kickstarter Hardware Roundup

April is almost over already, wrapping up another month of intriguing crowdfunding projects.

For this month’s crowdfunded goodness, we have a truly unique set of leather speakers from Italy that you build yourself, a development board with the power of a PC, and an Arduino compatible board with some great hardware features that are sure to help with your next project. Let's take a look.

Giacinto

Meet the Giacinto, a pair of high-quality DIY desktop speakers that are designed to give you a customizable experience while working with electronics. Each set comes packed in a silver bubble wrap bag with everything you will need, so no need to dig into the parts bin at home. These recycled leather bodied beauties come in a variety of colors and depending on your pledge amount, can even have laser created textures.

The kit includes the leather bodies, a pair of 2-inch speakers, two custom 3W amplifiers developed in conjunction with Italian record label Pink Elephant, and all of the requisite cables to get them cranking out your favorite music. Each loudspeaker is also rated 5W at 4ohm for a surprising amount of volume. You can grab yours for a $44 pledge right here on their Kickstarter. Giacinto has raised $7,500 of their $38,760 goal with 16 days left.

UDOO X86

Do you need to build, or should I say, want to build a computer to hook your newly built speakers up to? The UDOO X86 is a perfect solution. The UDOO X86 takes the capabilities of a PC and combines them with the programmability of an Arduino 101 board. There is a full suite of hardware to support a multitude of options such as 2GB of RAM (Basic) or 4GB of RAM (Advanced), 2GHz Intel processor (Basic) or 2.24GHz (Advanced), (1) HDMI, (2) Mini Display Port, and 8GB of eMMC. The UDOO X86 can run on Android, Linux, and even Windows.

Speed isn’t an issue as the UDOO X86 is up to ten times fast during benchmarking against other popular development boards like the new Raspberry Pi 3, Beagle Bone Black, and Minnowboard Max. It’s even powerful enough to run three, 4K displays! If using the UDOO for something a bit more physically engaging, then there is a 6-axis gyroscope and accelerometer. All of the usual connectivity options are also available with BTLE 4.0, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi so you can surf anywhere. An UDOO X86 Basic at the early bird price will set you back $89 while a UDOO X86 Advanced will cost $109. The UDOO X86 has already met their funding goal and then some with 41 days to go.

LoRa One

Another option if you don’t need that much PC muscle is the LoRa One IoT development board. The diminutive One only measures 40 x 25mm which makes it ideal for smaller IoT projects and features a ton of built-in features that usually need to be attached with add-on boards.

Some notable features include a u-blox EVA 7M GPS module, 3-axis accelerometer/magnetometer, LiPo charge controller, 14 I/0 lines, and an ARM Cortex M0 based processor. Opting for their Starter Kit will also include the Onebase and its 800mAh battery, 500mW solar panel, and various other connectors. There are also built in LED’s and on/off buttons for easy IoT integration. Land one with a $101 pledge for the LoRaONE and a $124 pledge for the Starter Kit. The LoRaONE has already surpassed its funding goal of $22,740 with 18 days to go.